Aria Gladiator Clarity X DAW Review
A powerful PC is essential these days and Aria reckons it has the perfect machine for music production. Hollin Jones fires it up and finds out.
Price: £1,300.00
Manufacturer: Aria
Website: http://www.aria.co.uk
Gladiator Clarity X DAW
Manufacturer Aria
Price £1,300
Contact Aria 0844 999 2499
Web www.aria.co.uk
Aria is a PC builder that’s perhaps best known for its gaming and home systems, but with its latest flagship workstation it is seeking to enter the high-powered world of computers designed for music production.
On the face of it, the needs of gamers and musicians are not worlds apart, focusing as they do mainly on raw power. Musicians tend to need more I/O, but this, as we shall see, is something that this system has in spades. It must be pointed out that the computer does not by default come with an audio interface, but an interface of your choice can be added when ordering (or purchased separately). In our tests we used a number of USB 2.0 and FireWire interfaces, although there is, of course, scope to add a PCI-based model here thanks to the tower design.
Worlds apart
With black cases dominating the pro audio PC world, it is a little surprising to find a fairly sparse white casing chosen here, although, as ever, the looks have no effect on performance and only occasionally on usability. The PC is heavy, but the door on the front is actually made of plastic, which feels a little flimsy. Behind that door you will find the optical drive (which houses a DVD rewriter/Blu-Ray player) and an integrated card reader with slots for just about every memory card format you could think of.
On the front edge of the case at the top you’ll encounter the power button, mini-jack audio in and out, a couple of USB ports and an eSATA port for easy access. The rest of the connections can be found on the rear panel – and there are quite a few of them. There are two USB 3.0 ports (allowing the connection of the latest USB 3.0-equipped peripherals) as well as a total of 14 USB 2.0 ports, so you probably won’t need a USB hub. There are also two SATA III and three SATA II connections as well as two eSATAs overall, plus a FireWire PCI card with two FireWire 400 and two FireWire 800 ports alongside gigabit Ethernet.
Graphic designs
In terms of graphics you are similarly well catered for: inside you’ll find integrated graphics as well as a Radeon HD 5450 1,024MB GDDR3 PCI-Express graphics card offering VGA, DVI-I and HDMI video out and support for DirectX 11. Such high-powered graphics are perhaps not as crucial to music producers as to gamers, but they’re good to have onboard, not least because they will enable you to run multiple large monitors, which is especially handy for sound-to-picture work. It’s safe to say that there’s probably as much I/O as you could ask for – and space to add specific extra capacity using one of the PCI slots.
Heart of the matter
Internally, the system employs the latest Intel Core i7-2600 CPU, running at 3.4GHz and with four physical cores, which thanks to HyperThreading means eight threads that can be processed. We have been very impressed with the i7s and these latest models engraved at 32nm are incredibly snappy. Paired with the preinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium, a fully 64-bit-capable OS, they offer incredible multitasking as well as excellent straight-line speed.
The processor supports Turbo Boost, meaning that when fewer cores are in use they can be automatically overclocked to 3.8GHz with no ill effects. Aria itself does not manually overclock the CPUs, partly for this reason and also because it maintains greater stability and reduces heat generation, which means less fan noise. Opinion differs about the wisdom of overclocking, but with chips that are this fast, well-coded software that uses all available threads is preferable to mucking about in the BIOS anyway.
The cutting-edge technology doesn’t stop at the CPU. You get 8GB of dual-channel DDR3 RAM plus the option to add more when ordering. Thanks to the 64-bit operating system, Windows is able to address all of this, and any 64-bit DAW will be able to do so as well. This includes the latest versions of Cubase, Sonar and Reaper, among others.
Drive time
The big advantage of a tower system, apart from PCI slots, is the amount of internal storage you can fit – and this system comes with tons of it.
The operating system resides on a 128GB solid-state drive, offering fast speeds for application launching, virtual memory operations and general system responsiveness. It’s also large enough that you won’t have to fret too much about installing apps that require a lot of content to be stored on the boot drive. Increasingly, you can offload large content sets onto other drives during installation, but not in every case. 128GB isn’t huge in the scheme of things, though, which is why there are three 2TB hard drives fitted as well, giving a whopping 6TB of disk space for samples, recordings and all your other data. Even when using large samples libraries and recording at very high sample and bit rates, it would take you a while to fill all that storage. In fact, you could even use one of the drives just for backing up!
On test
In use this system acquitted itself very well and we ran sizeable projects in Cubase and FL Studio using a USB 2.0 audio interface at a very low latency, with no audible pops or clicks. Heavy plug-ins such as convolution reverbs taxed the CPU only a little and the system remained responsive throughout, the specialised cooling systems keeping noise to a minimum even when under strain. As with similar PCs we’ve reviewed, we found that optimisation for multiple threads is good… but not perfect yet. This, of course, is for DAW/plug-in developers to work on, but for now it still seems advisable to go for a setup like this with fewer cores (as opposed to more costly hexacore models) but faster ones. When an application is able to utilise all eight threads you do get maximum performance, but when it can’t, it’s better to have a couple of cores running very fast. This processor seems to offer the best of both worlds: quick enough to make short work of simpler tasks, but with eight threads available when they can be leveraged by the software.
It feels like Aria has thrown almost everything at this PC, and that is by and large a good thing. Certainly, you won’t want for connectivity or storage and the latest i7 processor is more than capable of professional-level audio work. The price is pretty attractive, too, and you get a lot of bang for your buck. As ever you can tweak the specs during the ordering process to add or remove components, but overall this is a very solid performer, so with the possible exception of a little more RAM, it should be good as is for most producers.
WHY BUY
Excellent connectivity
Very quick CPU
64-bit system
Quiet operation
Great performance
Flexible graphics options
A good amount of RAM
Attractive price
WALK ON BY
You might want to specify a bit more RAM if you make a lot of use of large samples libraries
Verdict
A very solid and highly flexible PC for professional audio production – and at an attractive price.
★★★★★★★★★ (9/10)
Score: 9
This review first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 97
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